Imagine you own a brick-and-mortar store. What would be the key to making it profitable? A well-thought-out marketing strategy, a wide range of products on its shelves, or established relationships with your suppliers? The truth is, you couldn’t grow your business without any of these. And that’s exactly how it works when it comes to developing an effective website. This article explores three core components of every successful business website, regardless of its scale or target audience.
Tech stack that won’t fail your website
A supply chain is the key to everything in conventional stores, while a solid tech stack is the key to websites.
A tech stack means all the tools, programming languages and frameworks, security protocols, APIs, etc., that power your site’s back-end and front-end. It’s what you’ll build your website with – and what determines how you’ll manage it daily.
If you think about setting up a website for your business, there are a few things to consider regarding the tech side of the project.
1. How exactly is your website going to be built?
Nowadays, you’ve got three main routes you could take:
a) Developing its back-end and front-end from scratch, which will definitely be more expensive but will offer you more leeway for implementing fully custom solutions;
b) Designing and weaving it with one of the no-code/low-code platforms, like Webflow – which still leaves you facing a substantial challenge in back-end development;
or
c) Setting your site up through a content management system (CMS), which couples both front-end (the design of the website) and the back-end, while making the day-to-day website maintenance far easier.
2. What hosting solution should you choose?
A cloud-based service, like AWS or Azure? Or a fully dedicated server? It’ll mostly depend on the scale of your business and the amount of traffic you expect on your WWW.
No matter what, it must be reliable (99% uptime is a necessity, not an option), offer dedicated security solutions, be compatible with the rest of your tech stack (e.g. your CMS of choice) and provide you with the necessary monitoring and admin tools.
3. Which third-party tools do you need to integrate your website with?
In an era where APIs connect countless services, your technology stack must be sufficiently flexible. Whether connecting to payment gateways, social media platforms, or a CRM system, the whole website’s architecture should support smooth integrations without compromising performance.
User-centered design
There’s a reason why every guide regarding web design has a lot to say about UX. After all, a website’s success is ultimately measured by how the visitors feel about their experience and whether it makes them more likely to use your services.
That’s why you need to place your audience’s needs, behaviors, and preferences at the forefront of the whole design process.
This starts with a clear understanding of your audience, which includes researching user behavior, mapping their journeys, and identifying pain points. From there, the information architecture should remain simple and intuitive. For instance, a clean, well-organized menu structure coupled with breadcrumbs ensures that users always know their location within your site, while integrating search functionality further empowers users to swiftly locate the content they need.
The point is to make the whole experience as smooth as possible for your users… and to guide them towards taking specific actions (like filling up their shopping carts).
Obviously, every user-oriented design team has to take into account who exactly is going to use their website. Don’t forget that:
- According to WHO, about 1 in 6 people on the Earth has some form of physical or cognitive disability – which makes accessibility and meeting WCAG standards not an option, but a must.
- Over 60% of all Google searches are carried out on smartphones – that makes a mobile-first design approach, with fluid grids, flexible images, and touch-friendly interfaces, the only valid one in today’s digital environment.
Content that matters – both to your clients and to algorithms
As Bill Gates famously said, almost 30 years ago – “Content is king”.
And ever since then everything seems to prove him right. Content is what attracts visitors, engages them, and ultimately converts them into loyal clients. But at the same time – it has to perform well under the scrutiny of search engine algorithms. If you’re not seen on Google, you and your business (virtually) don’t exist.
That’s why your content should be simultaneously informative, engaging, and tailored to your audience’s needs. It should establish your authority, build trust with your visitors, and guide them through your site.
And on the other hand – it must be optimized for search engines. That means striking a careful balance of keyword research, implementing meta descriptions and structured data while maintaining your link-building strategy.
Mind you, don’t limit your content to blog posts alone. Videos or infographics diversify the user experience, transform passive visitors into engaged users, and help break down complex information into a more digestible form.
Bringing it all together
That’s not all there is to a website’s success. One could say a great deal about the importance of the look and feel, as well as the aesthetics, of your website – and they’d be 100% right. They matter a lot. However, ultimately, the core of your website’s success lies in how you handle technology, design and content. These are the foundations to keep every site afloat – everything else is built on that.
And if you want to provide your clients with a digital experience that truly makes an impact – Smartbees has something to offer you.
